Imagination and Possibility: Part 1

We can - and should - imagine a better world, and it helps if we know what is possible.

Photo by Lucas Chizzali on Unsplash

We can achieve incredible things

Every now and then I stumble across something that I think is astounding. A huge win against the odds that stands out like a beacon of possibility in a sea of business-as-usual extraction and domination. I can’t help but let my imagination run away with what might be possible if such dramatic shifts were achieved at a larger scale, across the world. In this three-part series, I want to share some of these degrowth-aligned feats as an example of what can be achieved, often as a result of citizens coming together in true democratic form and putting people - not profits and growth - at the heart of decision making.

Here is part 1:

1. No more mining

‘Everyone says that El Salvador has underground wealth - golden valleys and basins of silver’ … But extracting it, he said: ‘will destroy our lives’.

President of El Salvador, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, Source: Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy

In March 2017 Central America’s smallest country, El Salvador, voted overwhelmingly to prohibit all mining for gold and other metals. It was the first country in the world to impose a nationwide ban. Prior to his election in mid-2014, the Salvadorian President in office at the time of the ban being imposed, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, spoke of ‘buen vivir’ as an alternative model of prosperity. Under ‘buen vivir’ the emphasis was on living well, community and solidarity, not on extraction-dependent growth and development.

The nationwide ban on mining for metals was the result of decades of grassroots activism by those concerned about water stress and pollution from the industrial mining process (90% of the country’s ground water was already contaminated). The activists used simple but effective campaigns like ‘No to mining, Yes to life’, understanding that the (often questionable) economic benefits of mining meant very little if the country’s citizens were sick all the time. The win did not come easily with horrific acts of violence, including murder, committed against those who opposed mining.

Six years later this ban is still upheld, but it does appear to be on shaky ground. There are concerns that the temptation to use mining to generate international investment (and pressure by international investors) are too strong to resist.

2. Nationwide Meat Ban

For 12 centuries, until the late 19th century, the entire nation of Japan was essentially meat-free. Prior to the arrival of Buddhism from Korea in the 6th century eating meat was normal, and deers, wild boar and fowl were regularly on the menu, especially for aristocrats. In 675 A.D. meat was officially banned for part of the year, which would eventually become a year round ban that would last for over a millennia. The reasons were both spiritual and practical. The adoption of Buddhist principles from the 6th century onwards, including reincarnation (there was the possibility it one could be eating an ancestor), respect for life, and the avoidance of waste, changed the religious attitudes towards meat eating. Additionally, meat requires a huge amount of resources that the Japanese couldn’t justify which played a role in changing cultural attitudes towards meat-eating. Instead they used their resources to grow plant-based foods (mostly rice).

While meat was banned, seafood was still acceptable (including dolphins and whales), and wild animals were often still consumed, especially for medicinal purposes. In the late 19th century under new leadership the Japanese government moved to end two centuries of isolation and adopt Western practices and technologies, including eating meat. While it took some time to change the long-ingrained cultural practices, these days the Japanese eat meat regularly. That said, the 1,200 year meat ban remains an interesting example of how culture, religion and government can play a role in making something that was once socially acceptable, no longer so.

3. Deprivatised utilities

Since 2007, we learned, at least 170 municipalities in Germany alone had already brought privatised energy services back into public hands…. Globally, between 2000 and 2015, researchers at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam had also documented 235 cases of water ‘remunicipalization’ in 37 countries, affecting over 100 million people. Satoko Kishimoto, one of these researchers, pointed us to examples from Mozambique to Malaysia. ‘This is not a minor trend: many municipalities have been disappointed with privatisation, with costs, with service quality,’ she told us. ‘Remunicipalisation is seen as a tangible response, a way to rebuild important social services, more democratically.’

Source: Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy

As the above quote demonstrates, there’s a much under-reported trend happening across the world away from privatisation of public goods, including energy networks, water utilities and gas services. As an example, in 2013, after years of grassroots activism and civil disobedience, the city of Hamburg, Germany narrowly passed a referendum to remunicipalise the city’s energy, gas and heating networks from private corporations. Beyond simply taking back the energy grid, the referendum proposed to build ‘socially just, democratically controlled and climate-friendly energy supply from renewable sources.’

Democratic ownership of the fossil fuel industry is important and necessary because it is step one in any serious effort to limit our warming of the planet, as Jason Hickel highlights in this piece: ‘What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency?’. While this industry is privately owned, we will not be able to wind it down in line with the science-based targets, nor ensure that the fuels that are used go where they are needed, and not simple where they generate the most profit.

4. Local Currencies

Local currencies create local engagement. People care more, they shop locally and support one another. It helps us to see ourselves as dependent on each other. They become like small laboratories for new societal forms. New relationships with others are built. They reshape us.

Ester Barinaga, professor of entrepreneurship at the School of Economics and Management

Local currencies can vary depending on the purpose they were designed for, but typically they are used to promote trading within a defined local area. Where a conventional currency can be used to save, taking that money out of circulation, local currencies cannot usually be converted into regular currency, which means it only has a value when being spent. Local currencies can move money away from multi-national conglomerates to smaller, local, non-growth based businesses, promoting local production and consumption, sufficiency, community and connection.

In Brazil there are more than 40 local currencies in circulation. Backed by community banks, they allow funds to circulate within the local community and provide income to communities who may be poor in national currency. The town of Maricá’s local currency of Mumbucas is a good example, it was created as a digital ‘basic income’ for low income families. Over a quarter of the town’s residents receive a monthly payment (which was increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, a lifeline for many residents). This local currency has become “like oxygen to the economy”, helping to keep spending by the community within the community.

5. Car-free towns

There is growing awareness of the importance of walkable cities for both the pure enjoyment - and health benefits - of being able to enjoy a city on foot, and for the climate impact of a reduced reliance on cars. Cities like Amsterdam, Paris, Oslo and Tokyo are well known for their walkability, even if this may not have always have been the case. These cities provide a blueprint for other major cities around the world who want to create public spaces that are “people-, environment-, and future-centred.”

La Cumbrecita is Argentina’s lone pedestrian-only town, one of several measures village leaders have implemented over the years to protect the environment. The enclave, which is nearly self-sustaining, relies almost completely on renewable energy, recycles all its water and composts nearly all of its organic waste.

Source: La Cumbrecita: A Bavarian outpost in Argentina

Certainly, creating pedestrian and bike-friendly cities and towns is step one, but the next stage is to make these places car-free, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has actually happened in many places across the globe, from Venice to Old Town Dubrovnik, Fes El Bali in Morocco to Fire Island in New York. La Cumbrecita in Argentina (image above) is a beautiful example of a town that has been managed with the future in mind.

What do we do next?

Most of the degrowth-aligned actions I’ve outlined above have been a result of grassroots mobilisation and genuine democratic decision making. They are, of course, only a sample of what is possible (with more to come in part 2 and 3 of this series), and are an excellent reminder that democracy isn’t a spectator sport: if we want to create a better world we need to play a part in making it happen. As Ursula K. Le Guin so eloquently said:

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Speaking up, sharing ideas while simultaneously pulling back the covers on a system that is harming both people and the planet and connecting with like-mined people is how we start to delegitimise the current paradigm and bring about the kinds of system-wide shifts outlined above, and subsequently how we change the world. In other words, this is how we burst through the concrete pavement of business-as-usual, planet destroying capitalism.

Look out for ‘Imagination and Possibility Part 2’, to be published next Tuesday, 31st October, and Imagination and Possibility Part 3’, to be published the following Tuesday, 7th November.

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